PDMLink 9.1 and Windchill DS on NAS

Hi Antonio,

At the past 2 companies I worked at using Windchill 9.1 on Red Hat Linux 4.7 and 5.4 with the entire installation mounted to an EVA with daily instant (5 minute) HP Busines Copy backups including scripted WindchillDS exports, we never had an issue since 2007. I'm in constant contacts with my friends over at Motorola Solutions and Comdev. We placed the OS on a local install but everything else was mounted to the EVA. I always made sure that the NIC to the SAN devices was dedicated, redundant and high performance with 4 (2007) to 8GIG (2010) fibre (blades). Thus, the performance was very close to local HD.

With that configuration, it was very simple to rehost/mirror systems daily whichI never had a problem to do. After the first rehost, all I had to do was to re-import the updated export (rehosting) of recent Windchill DS.

You never want to share NICs with other servers in a VM farm because of the constant instant demand and stresses of accessing and writing data from multiple sources of Apache, WindchillDS, AD forests,Index Server, Windchill(classes, jsps, vaults, etc, tomcat cache, cache) and the database. Windchill is a trueinstant hog of resourses. If it doesn't get it at an instant, problems will cascade.

Talk to you soon,

Patrick

In Reply to Antonio Villanueva:

I came across CS128863 which indicates that Windchill DS requires use of local storage due to dependencies with Berkeley DB Java Edition. For those on unix servers and NAS have you come across this? Just spoke with tech support and confirmed this. So we moved to it a month ago and it worked fine. It was on the NAS with the rest of the application. Then, the server when down and we linked to a new server and all edits from past month were gone. It was easy to reconnect disconnected users but based on this new information, if we shutdown again, all that will be lost again.
https://www.ptc.com/appserver/cs/view/solution.jsp?n=CS128863&posno=7&q=Windchill%20DS&nav=ptcproductgroups||windchill||Product+Group||windchill

PTC recommended exporting LDIF and WindchillDS backup. Moving the WindchillDS install to a local disk, fix some startup links and reimport the ldif again. This also affects 10.1 as well.

Antonio Villanueva - Sr. Software Engineer - ISR Systems
UTC AEROSPACE SYSTEMS

Hi Antonio,

One more thing, I never installed Windchill with the PTC provided java verson on their CD's. Instead I used the Oracle suppliedinstall java version which really makes a difference at times. I always pointed Windchill to /usr/java/latest and never to the specific version of java. Thus, it was very easy to update java without completely changing paths of the entire install of Windchill. I think I past my installation Linux docs to everyone back in 2006 which showed that trick. I can't understand why companies choose Windows for Windchill installations. Once they go Red Hat Linux, they never go back or get very disappointed with administring and maintaining Windowns Windchill installations.

I'm wondering why you are having issue even with Berkeley DB Java Edition. Is your system fully 64bit or 32 bit? I don't know if there is any real 32 bit unix or linux systems out there. Java is definitely designed for 64bit unix and linux.

Can you give a configured Java install a try instead of PTC supplied version. Though the same, but the configured local install provided more flexibility on unix/linux platforms.

Good luck,

Patrick
In Reply to Patrick Chin:

Hi Antonio,

At the past 2 companies I worked at using Windchill 9.1 on Red Hat Linux 4.7 and 5.4 with the entire installation mounted to an EVA with daily instant (5 minute) HP Busines Copy backups including scripted WindchillDS exports, we never had an issue since 2007. I'm in constant contacts with my friends over at Motorola Solutions and Comdev. We placed the OS on a local install but everything else was mounted to the EVA. I always made sure that the NIC to the SAN devices was dedicated, redundant and high performance with 4 (2007) to 8GIG (2010) fibre (blades). Thus, the performance was very close to local HD.

With that configuration, it was very simple to rehost/mirror systems daily whichI never had a problem to do. After the first rehost, all I had to do was to re-import the updated export (rehosting) of recent Windchill DS.

You never want to share NICs with other servers in a VM farm because of the constant instant demand and stresses of accessing and writing data from multiple sources of Apache, WindchillDS, AD forests,Index Server, Windchill(classes, jsps, vaults, etc, tomcat cache, cache) and the database. Windchill is a trueinstant hog of resourses. If it doesn't get it at an instant, problems will cascade.

Talk to you soon,

Patrick

In Reply to Antonio Villanueva:

I came across CS128863 which indicates that Windchill DS requires use of local storage due to dependencies with Berkeley DB Java Edition. For those on unix servers and NAS have you come across this? Just spoke with tech support and confirmed this. So we moved to it a month ago and it worked fine. It was on the NAS with the rest of the application. Then, the server when down and we linked to a new server and all edits from past month were gone. It was easy to reconnect disconnected users but based on this new information, if we shutdown again, all that will be lost again.
https://www.ptc.com/appserver/cs/view/solution.jsp?n=CS128863&posno=7&q=Windchill%20DS&nav=ptcproductgroups||windchill||Product+Group||windchill

PTC recommended exporting LDIF and WindchillDS backup. Moving the WindchillDS install to a local disk, fix some startup links and reimport the ldif again. This also affects 10.1 as well.

Antonio Villanueva - Sr. Software Engineer - ISR Systems
UTC AEROSPACE SYSTEMS